For five seasons on David Simon’s HBO series The Wire, McNulty (Dominic West) was everyone’s favorite authority-shirking, Jameson-drinking homicide detective in West Baltimore. With almost no life outside of his job, and driven obsessively by his desire to make the city a better place, he’d often do so at the expense of his career. Even though he managed to piss off almost every single superior officer he encountered, and he would eventually pay dearly for it, no one could deny that he wasn’t “real police.”
So, to celebrate Jimmy McNulty and The Wire (currently available to stream on HBO Now), let’s relive all his snide, half-smirking quips with these twelve essential quotes.
“See, that’s what I don’t get about the drug thing. Why can’t you sell the sh*t and walk the f*ck away? Everything else in this country gets sold without people shooting each other behind it.”
While he may not have the edge that, say, Detective Rust Cohle did when in the interrogation room, McNulty can spot a weakness, as he did with D’Angelo, the “nephew to the king,” Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris). Along with Detective Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) and their signature back-and-forth rhythm, they worked for hours to exploit it.
“What, we don’t have enough love in our hearts for two wars?”
FBI Agent Fitzhugh (Doug Olear), while showing McNulty the latest in modern criminal surveillance technology, laments that it’s their last big drug case, as most of the manpower has been transferred to counter-terrorism in the wake of 9/11. Given his circumstances in the Baltimore P.D., McNulty’s question is both poignant and reasonable.
“The first time you f*cked me, you were gentle.”
Nobody had better conversations when they went out drinking than Bunk and McNulty, and none of them summed up their relationship better than this moment.
“That’s Protestant whisky!”
Speaking of his drinking, he does have the best go-to answer when he’s offered a Bushmills — even if the price is right.
“You don’t look at what you did before, you do the same sh*t all over.”
Not wanting to repeat the same mistake, and refusing to accept the possibility that his detail is closing the investigation over a lack of evidence, he begins to peruse over files from both the prior Barksdale case, as well as their port investigation. In doing this, McNulty looks to learn from his mistakes while fighting to keep his case open.
“You disappoint me, Stringer. I had such f*cking hopes for us.”
Imagine how let down you would be if you finally tracked down the criminal target that you’ve obsessed over for years — Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) — only to find him working in his copy store offering to sell you a condo.
“The things that make me right for this job, maybe they’re the same things that make me wrong for everything else.”
McNulty finds himself lost over the lack of closure he gets after the death of Stringer Bell, and the frustration he feels knowing that he had caught him, but that he’d never know. Pouring his heart out to Officer Beadie Russell (Amy Ryan), he looks to take a new direction in his life.
“No one, I mean no one, tells us how to waste our shift!”
Spending much of the fourth season sober and in uniform as a beat cop, McNulty’s quick to offer some advice to his less-experienced uniformed officers whose priorities are all out of order. Also, if you wanted to hang a picture of this quote and Jimmy’s grinning face on your cubicle wall, you might become an office hero.
“When you play in dirt, you get dirty.”
McNulty’s relationship with Bodie (J.D. Williams) goes back to the second episode, and he always managed to find a way (usually over some food) to find some common ground with him. They respected one another, plus they could share a laugh when he tells Bodie about the officer who got a bunch of yellow paint thrown on him by some kids.
The downside here is that it’s one of the last times they’ll speak, and those will be the last words of wisdom he’s able to pass down to Bodie, because just them being seen together by the wrong person changes the course of events dramatically.
“Who in this f*cking unit’s going to catch me? Most of the guys up here couldn’t catch the clap in a Mexican whorehouse.”
With police budgets slashed so the city can throw every spare dollar at the giant deficit in the education department, McNulty begins to stage the deaths of homeless men to look like serial killer crime scenes. As he tries to justify his actions to Bunk, who wants nothing to do with it, McNulty’s ego really starts to show. He knows he’s real police, and he knows most of the people he works with aren’t, which makes him believe he can get away with it.
“The lie’s so big, people can live with it, I guess.”
Bunk is somewhere between disgusted and amazed at his on-again/off-again partner after McNulty manages to scam the entire police department, and get Marlo Stanfield and his gang, all while not ending up in jail. McNulty does what he does best, he pretends to shrug it off.
“The f*ck did I do?”
After spending five seasons doing the two things he does best, police work, and pissing off his superiors, this is his most repeated line. It’s not really a question, but more frustrated self-awareness, as well as an anthem for any of us looking to shirk the blame.
